Easter – our life journey

Easter is our life journey.  An opportunity to realise with ever greater certainty, that we are indeed Easter people.

Our Lenten journey culminating on Easter Sunday, is never just one annual  journey made, and then dispensed with.  We are continually unwrapping the manifestation of Easter in our lives as we move from cross to resurrection; from suffering to joy made sense of and deepened by the richness of each Easter journey we complete.

It is a journey without timescale, where we remake and rediscover what lies beneath the many transitions and transformations gifted to us through the joys, challenges, uncertainties and sorrows in our lives.

You, God, have made yourself so close to our very being, so incarnate in us and with us as to render every experience a joy-filled expression of relationship with you, and with each other.

‘Risen’, you are the very reason we can continually reach out without measure to those made poor by every possible circumstance, and why we can draw on you, the source of our abundant hope and joy with ever increasing certainty.

As Pope Francis has shared in these days:

“God chose to enter into our human history the most difficult way possible: the cross. This way, no one could ever be so desperate so as not to be able to find Him, even in the midst of anguish and abandonment. God arrived in the very place we didn’t think He could be”.

(Pope Francis @Pontifex, Twitter, 3 April 2023).

Easter

And where is Jesus, this strange Easter day?
Not lost in our locked churches, anymore
Than he was sealed in that dark sepulchre.
The locks are loosed; the stone is rolled away,
And he is up and risen, long before,
Alive, at large, and making his strong way
Into the world he gave his life to save,
No need to seek him in his empty grave.

He might have been a wafer in the hands
Of priests this day, or music from the lips
Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips
Away from church, shakes off our linen bands
To don his apron with a nurse: he grips
And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands
The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope,
Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

[ … ]

Where Jesus held the helpless, died with them
That they might share his Easter in their need,
Now they are risen with him, risen indeed.

by Malcolm Guite

You will find the original poem, along with Malcolm’s other work here: https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/easter-2020-a-new-poem/